The idea with the package, which was first announced last year, is to give developers access to new features faster than they would with the regular releases of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform).

In October and December, Red Hat invited users to vote for what additions they'd like to see in future versions of Software Collections, and version 1.1 is based on the results.

Red Hat has also included Ruby 2.0 and Rails 4.0.2, which are now available on their own, allowing developers to get an updated version of Ruby without requiring the installation of Rails.

Version 2.x of Ruby was the winner in Red Hat's surveys. Version 2.0 provides substantial performance and reliability improvements, and includes a number of new features as well as improved debugging capabilities, according to Red Hat.

There are two new open-source Web server options in the form of Apache httpd 2.4.6 and Nginx 1.4.4, which came in second and fourth place. For now, Nginx is only a technology preview. Another newcomer to the family that users wished for is the MongoDB NoSQL database, which was the fifth most-wished-for addition.

The only thing missing from the top five is Boost, a set of C++ source libraries that came in third place.

Red Hat's surveys showed that Python and PostgreSQL were the most popular components in the first version, followed by Ruby and PHP. They also showed that many users were moving to version 3.3 of PHP and that the MariaDB database was becoming more popular.

The beta is available for use with RHEL 6 to users and partners with the right subscriptions. For users who want to delve into the details, Red Hat has published release notes on how to install and use the package and all the included parts.

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